Keep Your Family Warm and Safe—No Matter What

Yes, it's allowed, but it's genuinely uncommon here. Des Plaines is built on natural gas and electric infrastructure, and most new fireplace installs in the city are gas units rather than wood. A wood stove or insert is still a legal, permittable project through the City of Des Plaines Building Division—it's just a smaller, more specialized job than a standard gas conversion, and not every hearth dealer in the northwest suburbs keeps wood units on the showroom floor. If you want one, look specifically for a dealer that lists wood stoves and inserts, not just gas fireplaces.

Because wood installs are less common here, pricing varies more than it does for the gas conversions most northwest-suburb dealers handle every week. As a rough planning number, expect somewhere in the $4,000 to $9,000 range for a wood insert into an existing masonry fireplace, including a new stainless steel chimney liner—older Des Plaines chimneys from the 1950s and '60s frequently need relining before an insert can go in safely. A freestanding stove with all-new Class A chimney venting runs higher. A local dealer will give you a firm number once they've looked at your chimney and framing.

It depends on square footage, insulation, and whether the stove is doing primary or supplemental heat. Many Des Plaines homes are 1950s-'60s ranches and Cape Cods with modest square footage but older, less-insulated envelopes, which pushes sizing up a notch compared to a newer, tighter build. A small stove suits a single room or finished basement; a medium unit can carry a main living area; a large stove is rarely needed given how few whole-home wood setups exist in this market. A dealer will size your specific room and chimney during an in-home visit rather than relying on a generic square-footage chart.

If your home already has a masonry fireplace—common in Des Plaines's older subdivisions—an insert is usually the better path. It fits into the existing firebox, uses a relined version of your existing chimney, and turns a drafty, inefficient fireplace into a real heat source. A freestanding stove makes more sense if you don't have an existing masonry chimney, since it requires building new Class A chimney venting from scratch, which is a bigger and more expensive project in a suburb where that kind of construction isn't routine for local crews.

Yes—any new wood-burning appliance install requires a building permit through the City of Des Plaines Building Division, and the unit needs to meet current EPA emissions standards. Most dealers who actually install wood units handle the permit paperwork for you. Des Plaines has no listed air quality non-attainment issues or winter burn curtailment periods, unlike some western cities, so once your stove is installed and permitted, day-to-day burning isn't subject to smoke-advisory restrictions the way it is in some parts of the country.

With winters cold enough to rival Buffalo, NY, a mid-size non-catalytic stove from a brand like Pacific Energy or Lopi is a solid fit for supplemental heat in a Des Plaines living room or basement—efficient, easier to run than a catalytic unit, and well-suited to the oak, hickory, walnut, and maple firewood common in this part of Illinois. If you're leaning on the stove for real backup heat during a ComEd outage rather than just ambiance, ask a local dealer about longer-burning catalytic options, which hold a fire longer overnight on a single load.

An annual CSIA-standard inspection is the baseline for any wood-burning appliance, and it matters even more here because a lot of the masonry chimneys being fitted with inserts in Des Plaines are decades old and weren't built with wood-burning-insert use in mind. Get the chimney evaluated before installation—not just after—so any cracked flue tile or structural issue gets caught before a liner and insert go in on top of it. After that, a yearly sweep and inspection before burning season is standard.

There's no national forest land near Des Plaines and the Forest Preserves of Cook County don't issue personal cutting permits, so firewood here comes from local tree services, landscaping companies, and firewood dealers rather than public-land permits. Oak, hickory, walnut, and maple are the species you'll most often find sold by the cord in the northwest suburbs and downstate Illinois. Buying seasoned wood (dried at least six months to a year) matters more in a climate this cold, since green wood burns inefficiently and builds creosote faster in a stove that's working hard on sub-20°F nights.

For the overwhelming majority of Des Plaines homeowners, gas is the practical answer: natural gas service is widely available, installation is a routine job for local dealers, and there's no firewood to source or ash to manage. Wood makes sense in narrower cases—you already have a masonry fireplace you want to bring back to life, you want a heat source that works without electricity during a ComEd outage, or you simply want the experience of a real fire and are willing to source and store cordwood. Most Des Plaines households that have both use gas for daily convenience and treat wood as a backup or occasional-use option.

Open fireplaces suck—literally. As the fire burns, it consumes air your furnace already paid to heat and pulls it out through the chimney, so the house is actually colder after the fire goes out than before you lit it. An insert fixes this: it seals the chimney, puts fixed glass across the front, and turns that hole in your house into a real heat source.

New wood stoves are 70%+ efficient, so far less heat goes up the flue—which also means less draft to get a fire established. The rule: build a genuinely hot fire for about 45 minutes before you choke it down. Skip that and you get smoke in the room, creosote in the chimney, and a fire that never takes off. Most performance complaints trace straight back to this.

On average, a fireplace adds back to the home about the same amount you spent installing it. Add the monthly savings from heating the rooms you actually use instead of the whole house—often hundreds of dollars a year—and the value case is strong before you even count what a fire does for how your family uses the room.

Yes—by creating a comfort zone. A furnace heats every square foot of the house just to warm the one room you're in; a gas fireplace on low burns roughly a sixth of the gas a typical furnace does. Set the furnace around 55–60 degrees as a baseline, then heat the rooms your family actually uses. Families who heat this way commonly save $20–$60 a month.